Business analysis of Company A's maintenance organisation

Sammanfattning: Existing high voltage direct current (HVDC) stations have an estimated life-cycle of 30 to 40 years.During this time, operations will be subjected to varying disturbances, including spare partobsolescence, new cyber-security requirements, unforeseen failures as well as planned and forcedoutages. Until recently, HVDC station owners have managed maintenance themselves in accordanceto their own experience and the documentation provided at project delivery. Lately, increasingcustomer interest in life-cycle cost, service agreements and novel maintenance practices have creatednew business opportunities such as long-term full-service agreements (FSAs), call-centre support, carepackages, and more.This master thesis strives to map Company A’s current state to assess how prerequisites formaintenance are created during greenfield1 projects. Prerequisites for maintenance include manyaspects, including HVDC station design, maintenance planning, documentation, education, safety andother aspects governing conditions for effective maintenance. The purpose is to answer how CompanyA may organize responsibilities during pre-tender, tendering, project execution, warranty and servicecommitments to ensure that prerequisites for maintenance of HVDC systems are duly considered andoptimised according to the customer’s long-term expectations and satisfaction.Qualitative data was collected through 17 semi-structured interviews across different functions withinCompany A’s organisation. Also, a cross-sectional survey, combining open and closed questions aimedat the maintenance situation of HVDC stations where Company A has FSAs, was conducted. The resultconstitutes of a current state description based on the interviews. The ensuing discussion providesrecommendations based on the established needs, as well as insights provided through literature.Conclusively, a maintenance engineering function is proposed to address task ambiguity,organisational deficiencies, and create a process for formalisation of experience, maintenancedevelopment, and continuous improvement of the maintenance process. Specific recommendationsinclude the introduction of a new customer information channel called Incidents, where operators ofHVDC stations may communicate design-flaws, suggestions on improvements and other issues that donot naturally fall within the equipment failure record (EFR) and disturbance outage report (DOR)category. Also, the maintenance activities listed in the maintenance activity list (MAL) (provided to thecustomer at project delivery) may be refined by clustering maintenance activities, to ensure that themaintenance time is minimised and not treated as a sequential list (which affects planned outagefrequency and scheduled outage time). The survey was inconclusive due to a low response rate.